Re: Why do documents become corrupt (Word 2002 /XP SP3)

I see corrupt documents at work from time to time, but not often.

Features that may contribute to corrupting documents are:
- Turning on "Fast saves" in the Save tab of Tools | Options...
- Turning on saving of versions in File | Versions...
- Editing a subdocument from within a master document (many maintain that any use of master documents leads to corruption)

Re: Why do documents become corrupt (Word 2002 /XP SP3)

Long documents are naturally more prone to corruption than short ones. The document management system may well be a factor - I have seen you post many problems here that I never experience at work (we don't use a DMS).

Re: Why do documents become corrupt (Word 2002 /XP SP3)

Hi Diana,

I've been working with Word docs since W'95 and with numerous layouts of the documents.
One recurring problem is when users delete section breaks unintendedly.

Some years ago we had a layout that caused this in particularly. It was a two column format controlled by section breaks.
Often users don't want to turn on the "show/hide" feature as they find it looks "untidy" - so they prefer a simple blank page, where all editing and navigation marks are hidden. Then when they come across section breaks, they accidentally delete those. As the section break holds a lot of important info to word (margins, header footer info etc) this can cause the crashes.

My experience has been that its in particular those issues (section breaks, header/footer) and as Hans mentions the Master/Sub issues - that causes these kind of disturbances.

Bests, RD

PS: Wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness," but that doesn't work

Re: Why do documents become corrupt (Word 2002 /XP SP3)

<P ID="edit" class=small>(Edited by JanB on 02-Mar-06 07:55. corrected typo)</P>I agree Henrik. And I would like to add another culprit: inserting a document or copying a part of a document where the inserted/pasted part contains one or more section breaks. Especially when inserted/pasted in an unprotected section of a document protected for Forms. I've seen documents with the header of one document and the footer of another as the result of such a copy/paste action. And trying to fix this may cause even more problems. I was called in a few times when users couldn't open such documents any more.

Re: Why do documents become corrupt (Word 2002 /XP

As long as we're all sharing stories...

In one case, a chunk of a document turned to gibberish when the IT guys rebooted the server while a user had the file open and the document was next saved. Important note to IT: tell users to close open files before rebooting a server!

In another case, the formatting data in the document got out-of-sync with the text, so, for example, all the "bold" attributes shifted to text a number of characters before their original locations. I can't recall whether we ever figured that one out.